I wonder why there could be confusion about the chain of command and who actually has what authority. I wonder how that happened, like if this was an easily foreseeable consequence to some kind of earlier action.

I don’t have much sympathy for the “let’s wait and see” moderates, but I do think there’s a coherent difference between people who have tried AI tools and found some use for them in some limited context and people who go full Howard Hughes with it like John McGasTown or whatever that idiot’s name is. To me it feels like an extension of the argument that these so-called AI systems are a normal trchnology. They aren’t a harbinger of the end times, whether you interpret that as the singularity or the biblical Armageddon. It’s a normal technology that is breaking in normal ways and is breaking society and the economy in the ways we would expect late capitalism to break. If it wasn’t this it would probably be something else. Hell, there’s still a chance that the wheel turns to “Quantum” or something else after this and we stretch another few years out of that before the music stops.

AI is a bad tool for any given job, and is fundamentally not worth the price that we as a society are paying to let it exist at this scale. If it wasn’t being subsidized by capitalists chasing ridiculous returns and bouyed by an economic system structured entirely around giving it to them then there’s no way in hell it would have hit this point. But that’s not incompatible with people being able to find utility in it in some cases, and I think we lose credibility by treating any admission that someone has found any value in AI products as a confession of unseriousness. That doesn’t mean their use isn’t still part of the problem, but I’d we frame the critique in terms of “how much would you actually be willing to pay for you ‘occasional’ use?” It would redirect the discussion away from the subjective “well I found it useful for X” to the more objective question of just how expensive and destructive these things are to operate and how much of those costs are going to have to be subsidized forever if these things are going to stick around.

This week in unsettling AI ads.

The algorithms feed me variants on this one pretty frequently, always with some fantasy woman offering to be your best friend and definitely not maybe give you dirty pictures. “Normal human woman tied up in a basement” is new, though, and even skeezier than usual. I don’t know what the workflow is for these or whether there’s an actual person writing the prompts for this, and I don’t think there’s any answer that would make me less uncomfortable about it.

Given the Star Wars discussion alluded to in the next paragraph, I think we’re looking at “try rereading your first book while being less of a self-important dumbass.” Like, I get it, Revan is one of the best characters in that canon, and where Vader fell for very human if selfish reasons Revan pushes even farther and was using the dark side to conquer the galaxy in order to try and save it from… being conquered by a sith empire that drew great and terrible power from the dark side of the force. What happened to Vader again? Oh yeah, he sought the dark side for the power to save his wife and became a great and terrible warlord by calling on his rage and despair over… killing his wife. Like, the fact that trying to gain power through the dark side is at best a self-destructive shortcut that will undermine your actual goals is pretty goddamn consistent, and this is Star Wars Legends, a canon not exactly known for being internally consistent. I’m not saying you need to “agree” with that premise, and I think the franchise as a whole is usually too conservative, with the passivity of the light sife being a big part of that. It’s just deeply absurd to me for that to be the takeaway from that story. Like all the people who’s main takeaway from Jurassic Park was “man, wouldn’t it be cool if we had real dinosaurs?” who then went on to be the victims and villains of Jurassic World.

I can understand what they’re saying, though. Like, his defining moment is the finale of SC1 where he does sacrifice himself and become this major culture hero. There is definitely room to question that warrior ethos and what it says about the Protoss and what that in turn says about how we think about the real-world cultures and ideas that inspired them, and I’m pretty open to those constructs not being particularly respectful. But within those background structures and the culture they describe the immediate storyline is about how the conclave and even the Khala itself is ultimately destructive and makes the Protoss more vulnerable even as it is their source of strength and identity, which feels actually pretty timely if you read it that way.

Okay, today’s Rat fixation that I want to rant about is “constructing hypothetical examples to justify my idiosyncratic position.” Like, I’m not even interested in arguing about whether their conclusion makes sense in their hypothetical world, I’m more curious about what kind of chain of thought leads you to speculate about that in 2026. Like, maybe I’m reading way too much into this but in practical terms it feels like “how do I justify voting for the Republicans no matter how far-right they might go, if my local Democrats try to move the tiniest bit left?” which feels like the rat/tech ethos in a nutshell.

Or maybe it’s the more traditional past time of trying to construct arguments in favor of controversial-sounding positions so that you can feel smarter and more open-minded than everyone else.

Only the magic eight ball has been rigged with sides reading:

• Signs point to yes

• It is decidedly so

• Absolutely. You’re so smart

• Maybe. Good question!

• There are strong reasons to think so

• Lots of people are saying it

• I can see why you’d ask that

• There isn’t a strong consensus either way

Is that what “g” has stood for all this time?

But despite well-documented claims to genius IQs, somehow the billionaire set ends up not on the chopping block.

To be fair, while I’m not familiar with the discourse in China I know a lot people consider (rightly) “alignment” as a framing to be a red flag for cranks and rats. It’s not that surprising that this attitude hasn’t been getting much recognition when the marketing departments of ai companies has been more engaged on that subject than serious academics.

The Vatican has been two weeks away from a nulear weapon for the last 20 years, ever since that business with the antimatter bomb at the conclave. It’s a boogeyman they’re using to try and justify continuing the forever war against Italians. I say if they want atomic spaghetti, let em have it.

Okay but hear me out: if they do restrict it to only Russian training data then it’s gonna end up having a small enough set to fail in truly comical ways.

You can see also his rabbit counterpart from Zootopia in a princess dress in the background of the first picture!

I’m sorry, I think I need to believe that this is taking the piss in order to be able to function. It can’t be real (It’'s definitely real).

Oh God I read their FAQ and it looks like the whole concept is to gamify smoking weed because if there’s one problem with weed it’s that it’s not addictive enough on its own. I mean the actual concept is to try and smash enough hip tech buzzwords together to extract some amount of the dwindling venture capital continuing to slosh around the valley, but if it actually happens the thing it’s going to do is take all the addictionware tactics that app developers have developed and bring them to bear on promoting drug use.

Yeah. I mean, I’m going to assume that he’s not specifically referring to LLCs and that, say General Partnerships and Sole Proprietorship aren’t actually better, mostly because they absolutely share the same problems. But that’s a whole lot of digital ink spilled about how important it is to create “digital public goods” - and one assumes public goods more generally, given our ongoing inability to subsist on digital food - without any real thought put to how such systems should be organized, controlled, protected, etc. Like, if he stopped trying to wave “digital innovation” around like a magic wand he’d basically have to be a communist or anarchist of some flavor. But he’s still sufficiently in the Silicon Valley Milieu where lefty politics are too cringe to admit, so he’s stuc having identified some real problems and having no realistic starting point for solving them

Dramatic fascistic “RETVRN” language and focus on aesthetics aside, my wife and I actually dug into some of this lighting quality stuff a while ago and while our very good friend here does a poor job explaining it there is a definite difference in normal LEDs vs incandescent or natural light. The LED spectra is fascinating - big spikes at a couple wavelengths and nothing in between. In my experience with switching to the fancier high-CRI LEDs the difference is pretty minimal. Feels like a possible case where you don’t notice it, but your brain does. For my wife it seems to have helped reduce the incidence and severity of her crippling migraines, which is obviously more impactful. I don’t think I’d say it beautified the space or brought us back to the halcyon days of our glorious past, but that’s been huge for us all the same. The plural of anecdote is not cliche, but there’s not nothing here.

I can’t imagine the Mouse being happy about this cameo.

Okay much as I’m angry and want to I’m resisting the urge to go point-by-point until I have more time. But I also want to point out that in form it seems like The Beigeness has really caught on as a writing style. Like, we have 22(!) individual points, each of which gestures vaguely at the kind of militant interventionist white nationalist technocracy that could conceivably power the unholy chimera of a silicon valley tech giant and a murderous beltway defense contractor. But unless the book does so more openly, they avoid clearly stating the actual thesis. It’s not really surprising, just interesting to note the pattern spreading from Rat spaces into the broader right wing.

On one hand, I appreciate their acknowledgement that legitimacy matters to a government’s ability to govern. While the talk about the king as a figure tied to a broader structure that creates obligations and requirements just as strongly as it does power and privilege isn’t entirely historically accurate it’s at least less absurd than Yarvin’s notion of the dictator as a kind of unmoved mover - someone with both absolute power and absolute discretion to do what they want with it.

At the same time, if you follow that chain of thought to it’s actual conclusions you end up with some kind of radical democracy. Like, legitimacy is just a way to ask the question of why anyone should bother to do what the guy calling himself king says. Historically speaking this often boils down to trying to judge how credible the threat of violence is should you refuse. If the king isn’t going to be around in a week due to an ongoing succession crisis then there’s no point in getting ready to pay his taxes next month, essentially. But if we reframe the question another answer becomes available: why should people consent to be governed? And the democratic answer is that the government represents their interests and is trying to organize and take actions they support. Government by consent of the governed is a descriptive statement about how governments operate, not a normative one about how they should. Once you account for the extra costs and consequences of needing to manufacture consent through violence and repression the supposed efficiency of dictatorship evaporates.